Breve - Other Uses

Other Uses

In other languages, it is used for other purposes.

• In Romanian it is used above the A to represent the mid-central vowel, as in măr (apple).
• G-breve appears in the Azerbaijani, Tatar, and Turkish alphabets. In Turkish, ğ lengthens the preceding vowel. It is thus placed between two vowels and is silent in standard Turkish but may be pronounced in some regional dialects or varieties closer to Ottoman Turkish.
• The breve, together with the circumflex and horn, are used in the Vietnamese language to represent additional vowels.
• The McCune-Reischauer Romanization of the Korean hangul script uses breves, not carons, over o and u to indicate the vowels ㅓ (ŏ) and ㅡ (ŭ).
• H-breve below Ḫ ḫ is used to transliterate the Arabic character Ḫāʾ (خ) in DIN 31635. It is also used to transliterate Akkadian, Hittite cuneiform, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
• On German-language maps, a double breve is often used in abbreviated placenames that end in -b͝g., short for -burg, a common suffix originally meaning “castle”. This prevents misinterpretation as -berg, another common suffix in placenames (meaning “mountain”). Thus, for example, Freib͝g. stands for Freiburg, not Freiberg.

Note that Pinyin uses the caron, not the breve, to indicate the third tone of Mandarin Chinese; the breve cannot be used as a substitute in computer environments.